William Turner: Tudor naturalist, physician and divine

Italy, true nurse of talents. .. I [now] can foresee no possible opportunity for performing dissection-here I cannot easily obtain even a skull." Vesalius' complaint underlines the decline and decadence-after a promising start-of Spanish science in the second half of the sixteenth century, a phenomenon often commented upon and usually attributed to social and cultural factors peculiar to Spain. Power and penury is restricted to assessing the involvement of the Spanish crown in this period with technology and natural science, even though the topics Goodman chooses to consider all have implications for the broader phenomenon to a greater or lesser degree: the occult, cosmography and navigation, shipbuilding and gunnery, mining, and the organization of medical services. The crown, he argues, was concerned to develop an indigenous technology, and while forced initially to import foreigners, Italians and Germans (Vesalius was a Fleming), hoped to make Spain technologically independent; but, he concludes, its plans had little success. To explain the failure of these efforts, Goodman looks to economic causes and dismisses social or cultural explanations: "poor economic rewards may well have been the main reason for the crown's shortages in military physicians, pilots and gunners .... The failure of the treasury ... was the most important reason for Spain's limited technological achievement." This may indeed be a part of the explanation for Spanish scientific decline, but it is not easy to be sure, for Goodman's argument is impressionistic rather than rigorous, and Vesalius' complaint suggests, after all, that money was not the answer to every problem. Nor was Spanish achievement quite so low as it is portrayed here. If Goodman had chosen to discuss civil architecture-surely just as much technology as marine or military engineering-he would have confronted a conspicuous success: the construction of the Escorial (1563-84) by Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera (both Spaniards), which involved engineering accomplishments of the first order. In this case, as in that of Vesalius, achievement or its absence depended on royal (or social) priorities, not merely money. Hence, while the author's exploration of archival materials has certainly enriched our knowledge of those topics he has addressed, and restricting his attention to the crown has allowed him to argue convincingly for royal interest, it remains doubtful whether the crown's involvement with science and technology should be studied in isolation from general tendencies within the rest of Spanish society. In a 1983 article from …